"Manahatta" at Oregon Shakespeare Festival

OSF photo by Jenny Graham

Theaters seem to be rediscovering their Native American roots. For example, I've noticed that several theaters, particularly outdoor amphitheaters, have taken to explicitly acknowledging that the theaters stand on the grounds of particular native peoples. I don't know whether that same trend is reflected in the fact that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has also featured plays with Native American themes, casts, and playwrights (including last season's Off the Rails), but I'd guess it's not a complete coincidence.

This season features the world premiere of Manahatta, playwright Mary Kathryn Nagle's attempt to bridge the past and present of the Lenape people, the original inhabitants of Manahatta, the "island of many hills," now known as Manhattan. The Lenape were "relocated" to Oklahoma.

The Play

Straddling these two worlds of the Lenape is Jane Snake, a brilliant young woman who has graduated MIT and wants to leave her native lands in Oklahoma to make it on Wall Street. But just as she is interviewing at an investment bank, her father is dying back home, so we immediately see the forces pulling her in both directions. Jane gets the job, but barely makes it home for the funeral.

Meanwhile we see some of the other conflicts within the family and community. Jane's mother has issues with holding the funeral in a Christian church. And it turns out she needs a lot of money to pay her husband's terminal medical bills, but a local banker who also happens to be an official in the church helps her to get a mortgage.

Mixed in with the modern views of life on the reservation and working on Wall Street are scenes of the Lenape back home in Manahatta, gathering shells and weaving wampum, and sometimes interacting with the Dutch settlers.

Throughout the play, Nagle shows the parallels between the Dutch exploitation of the Lenape and the predatory practices of the modern Wall Street firms, heightened by placing Jane's arrival just at the point where the high-flying investment banks are about to hit the financial crisis of the early 2000s. We get to see the Dutch colonial governor Peter Minuit and his extremely valuable tulip contrasted with Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld and his mortgage-backed securities as the value of each commodity skyrockets and then plummets.

Similarly, we see a Dutch missionary trying to save and convert the natives, contrasted with the modern church elder/banker trying to help Jane's mother save her house by coercing her into taking out a mortgage that will surely balloon out of control, meanwhile leveraging her to start attending church, too.

Ultimately the argument of the play is economic, that the Europeans only care about making money, and the Native Americans get either tricked or forced into transactions they don't really understand. That argument has some credibility in the colonial period, but the case is a bit weaker in the present day.

The Production

Staged in OSF's Thomas theater, the small, black-box theater, the play is on a scale that works well in the setting. And the staging designed by Mariana Sanchez suits the space well. I like the way the Lenape people move back and forth in time, emphasizing the parallel stories, as the European characters inhabit corresponding roles in each timeline. For example, Jeffrey King is both Peter Minuit and Dick Fuld, and David Kelly both the Dutch missionary and the modern banker/church elder.

Tanis Parenteau is quite good as Jane, though it remains a bit unclear to me how her character ultimately gets as disconnected as it does from her home and culture. It's kind of an assumption, but I'd have liked to see more of the explanation of that.

The acting and movement are quite excellent throughout, and I found the Lenape portions quite compelling. And I guess as long as you are willing to just look at them as collateral damage of the juggernaut of capitalism, that's OK. I mean, that's certainly been the case, but unless we're shown some kind of alternate path, I'm not sure what the dramatic interest is. Is there some way a talented, motivated character such as Jane could have done something different to make the rapacious bankers less destructive to those around them? Could the scouts for Minuit and the Dutch colonists have stood up to the destruction they saw coming?

As a dramatization of descriptive history, it's well done and pretty interesting, but I wish the play were able to highlight turning points where things might have been different. Otherwise, it all seems rather bleak and defeatist. Maybe that's Nagle's point, that it was inevitable that peoples such as the Lenape would be swamped by the tide of surging European greed and self-interest, but as such it doesn't seem particularly compelling.

Bottom Line

It's a pretty good story, regardless, and interestingly presented in a high-quality production. I admit I learned some things about the Lenape people that I hadn't known before, but didn't get much insight into the other side of things. And maybe that's the lesson--I should just listen to the tale of the conquered people. We're all entitled to tell our stories. I just can't help thinking there is also a bigger story that might have fit in here, too.

Overall I thought it was fine. Not one of the tip-top productions we saw this year, but certainly worth seeing and enjoying.